He was nearly twenty-six when, in 1960, his first ‘proper’ job materialised he was to keep it for the next twenty-six.

After a six-month trip through the USA with Maurice Keen (later a brother-in-law), Keegan worked for a couple of years at the American Embassy in London. Keegan read history at Balliol, learning about the Middle Ages from Richard Southern and the seventeenth century from Christopher Hill, and chose as his special subject ‘Military History and the Theory of War’. They were a bright lot and included a future Lord Chief Justice (Bingham), two Northern Ireland Secretaries (Peter Brooke and Patrick Mayhew), the writer Ved Mehta and the historians Keith Thomas and Maurice Keen. A pair of kindly teachers in the hospital school, followed by two years at Wimbledon College, a Jesuit school, helped equip the boy to get into Oxford in 1953.Īt Balliol, Keegan, walking painfully with a stick, was surrounded by robust, self-assured young men, most of them just out of National Service. Struck down by tuberculosis as an adolescent, Keegan spent his mid-teens in hospital beds just when other boys were learning the rituals of emerging masculinity. His father was a schools inspector in Clapham whose district was evacuated during the war to the Dorset-Somerset borders, where Keegan still remembers seeing US troops mobilising for D-Day. All these (not to mention an anthology of ‘great military writing’) constitute an astonishing efflorescence of talent that, by Keegan’s own admission, remained many years in the bud.īorn in 1934, Keegan is of Irish Catholic extraction on both sides. Whatever the cause, the effects were a cascade of major works: The Mask of Command (a study of generalship), substantial military histories of both world wars, an elegant peregrination around the battlefields of North America, the colossally ambitious History of Warfare and the BBC’s 1998 Reith Lectures, War and Our World. Or the fact that, shortly after the house move, Keegan quit his job lecturing at Sandhurst and joined the Daily Telegraph. We were sitting in Keegan’s office in the large manor house in rural Wiltshire that he and his wife Susanne (author of books on Alma Mahler and Kokoschka) acquired fifteen years ago. John Keegan was knighted in the Millennium honours and is still not quite used to the idea. In and all around his desk piles of books jostle for space with as yet unanswered letters of congratulation.

The First World War by John Keegan